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If you’ve been a regular blog reader, you probably know that this past June we launched a new EarthLink 4G Internet On-the-Go service to help you stay fully connected all around town or even around the U.S.

Our mobile 4G service really is convenient, powerful, and simple, but like any kind of technology, sooner or later you’re bound to encounter some issues or errors. Today’s tech tip will help you quickly resolve them if you do.

There are several reasons why you may not be able to pull up the EarthLink 4G Hotspot page in your browser, why you might have low signal strength or even no signal.

There could be a problem with your browser or your computer’s firewall or security software could be blocking access to the hotspot page, but here are our recommended steps for troubleshooting any 4G connection issues:

Try to reposition your 4G hotspot: This is especially important if you are indoors. Try several locations to see if the signal strength improves. Moving close to a window often helps.

Check your 4G hotspot: Make sure that it is powered on and that your laptop, tablet or other device you are using is connected to the hotspot by Wi-Fi.

Verify the 4G hotspot page URL: You should see http://earthlink4g or http://192.168.1.1 in your browser’s location bar.

Clear your browser: Clear your browser’s cache, cookies and temporary Internet files. See this Support Center article to learn how to do this.

Disable other connections: If your Wi-Fi device is connected to other devices (with an Ethernet cable, for example) or connected to other networks, disable these connections or remove the cables from your Wi-Fi device.

Disable security software: If you have Internet security or firewall software running on your Wi-Fi device, disable it and see whether that resolves the connection issue. Some firewall software may block access to the 4G hotspot homepage. If this is the issue, please contact the manufacturer of your security software to troubleshoot why it is blocking you from accessing this page.

We’re going to go through and highlight its features and try to explain why features like these matter to business owners so you can make more informed decisions and ultimately choose the best web hosting service for your business.

WEB HOSTING OVERVIEW

Our Business Website Plus package is designed for small businesses that want an easy and effective way to build, manage, and market their own website. It offers an easy-to-use website builder with advanced business web templates, an easy-to-install WordPress blog, email marketing and social media tools, and a mobile-optimized website.

BUILDING YOUR BUSINESS WEBSITE

When getting started with web hosting, you’ll want to feel confident you’ve got everything you need to get a really professional and effective website launched – with minimal time and stress. So you’ll want to look for features like these offered with Business Website Plus.

Website Builder: An easy-to-use website builder like ours can empower you to quickly create a professional-looking website. You shouldn’t need to know an HTML or anything about coding or websites. (If you really don’t want to do it yourself you should look for a web hosting plan that includes professional website design.)

Mobile Website Builder: It’s more and more important to have a mobile-friendly website to reach smartphone & tablet users. So you’ll want to make sure you have an easy-to use mobile website builder, too.

Website Templates: Templates make site building as easy as possible. Simply select the business-themed template that works best for your business and add your business and product information. Click. Publish.

Advanced Web Templates: Having more options is always good. Business Website Plus offers thousands of highly customizable, advanced templates along with the more basic templates.

WordPress Blog Installer: Even if you know you won’t start blogging right away, you should be read to do so. Blogging is a great way to promote your business, engage your customers, and get search engine results. WordPress is the #1 blogging software, and having a simple WordPress Installer lets you add a blog to your business website in no time.

Photo Gallery Installer: A picture gallery is another feature that can help you showcase your business. Having an installer to seamlessly set this up on your business website is key.

OPTIMIZING & MARKETING YOUR WEBSITE

Getting your business website online is a huge first step. Next is making sure you can optimize it so search engines rank it, effectively marketing to attract visitors, and measuring your success. So, you’ll want to look for web hosting features like these from our Business Website Plus plan.

Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization (a.k.a. SEO) are the techniques you use to help your web pages rank higher in search engine results. And higher rankings equals more traffic to your business website. Our EasySiteOptimizer too helps you with SEO; select keywords for each webpage, analyze site content and layout, and identify areas that require changes.

Directory Listings: While search engines are more important for most businesses, online directories can also help send traffic to your website and your local business. Easily submit your business information to more than 60 online business directories and GPS navigation systems at one time.

Email Marketing: Email is still an effective way to market your business and keep your customer base engaged. Our Announcer Pro tool lets Business Website Plus subscribers store 500 contacts, and create and send HTML emails (campaigns and newsletters). You can choose from 300+ easy email templates and get detailed reporting on your email marketing results.

Call Tracking: Get valuable insights into your marketing with a unique phone number for marketing campaign measurement; features include call recording, lead capture, call forwarding, voicemail-to-email, virtual receptionist, click-to-call and more.

Social Media Marketing: Social media is an important place to engage your customers and reach out to new ones. But it can be a lot of work. Our social media tool helps you manage multiple social media accounts from one simple interface. Post to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networks simultaneously.

Website Analytics: Knowledge is power, right? That’s why you’ll want to learn as much as you can about your visitors. Use our website analytics tools to track site visits, duration on page, referrals and more so you can optimize your site.

In addition to these web hosting plan features, you’ll want to make sure you get a domain name (Business Website Plus includes a free domain and supports up to 10 domains), domain email addresses (Business Website Plus includes 200 of them, with 1GB of storage for each address), and enough storage space and bandwidth for your business website (Business Website Plus includes 300GB of storage and 3,000GB per month of bandwidth).

Whether you choose our Business Website Plus or another web hosting service, we hope this information helped you make a decision and we wish you the best of luck with your business online.

IT departments at many companies struggled to maintain the performance of their systems due to the significant spikes in Internet traffic going to Apple.com as employees rushed to update their iPhones and iPads.

Individual users struggled too.

If you tried to download iOS right away, you likely experienced some of the issues I did: conflicting reports about the download being available, then not available. Unexpected error messages. Verrrrrrrrrry long download times.

I guess that’s to be expected when 200 million devices download a single update, which is the number of downloads Apple confirmed on Monday.

So, was it worth it? If you’ve downloaded iOS 7, you can tell us by leaving a comment below.

I’m personally enjoying it on my iPad. Looks good. Works well. The only problem is now I have to work a little harder to pry my iPad out of the hands of my kids.

But you might also be missing the kind of one-on-one interaction you can have with your customers when they walk into your store or offices: asking them if they need any help, chatting about their needs, and answering their questions.

Next you should add an agent for your chat service. Click the Add button to get started.

Enter a name and password for your agent. You may also decide to add a maximum number of chats your agent can handle at once and an email address (though these are not mandatory). Click Finished when you’re done.

Click the Setup tab (top right) to choose colors for your Visitor and Agent themes, add a logo, add a Chatsubject label, add a Not in service message, allow chat transfers between agents, and decide what questions should be initially asked in all chats (such as requests for name, the customer issue, customer email address; choose Other if you want a custom question).

If you’ve set up a support email address and included a request for customer email address, you can click a checkbox to have a transcript of the chat sent to the customer automatically.

Click on the Agent/Client Code Snippet link to get the source code that should be put into your support pages. Copy the code that appears in the pop-up window and paste it into the HTML of your pages. You can change the text that says Client Login to something else, like Chat with Us or Start Chat if you like.

Click OK to complete setup.

Once setup is complete, agents can click back on the EasyLiveChat icon, and then Agent Login. Enter the username and password you chose in step 6 above to log into the EasyLiveChat service.

We’ll cover the details of how an agent can log in and manage chats with customers visiting your business website in a future post.